“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in the preface to his semi-autobiographical novel, Immaturity, “you may as well make it dance.” This attitude appears to be shared by the Canadian filmmaker and actress Sarah Polley, who, in Stories We Tell, takes a sledgehammer to the door of the family crypt and does her damnedest to whip up a conga line.

Like her excellent earlier features, Away From Her and Take This Waltz, Stories We Tell comes down to a marriage in crisis: the difference this time is that the marriage is a real one. Polley’s third film is a cine-memoir of her late mother Diane, and particularly an indiscretion that took place thirty-some years ago, the discovery of which led the director to question her parentage.

All of this comes to us second-hand: from talking-head interviews with Polley’s very charming close family and a handful of other key participants; vintage-looking home movies shot on a hand-held Super 8 camera; and a narration written and performed by Michael, her father.

Michael is an affable, Bernard Cribbins-ish writer and former actor who emigrated to Canada from Ilford, and we see him recording his lines in a sound booth while his daughter directs him from the other side of the glass. Sometimes, if a sentence seems to have caused him a degree of emotional distress, she coolly asks him to repeat it.

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“What a vicious director you are,” he tells her, after her line of questioning brings tears to his crinkling eyes. He’s right: behind his 34-year-old daughter’s gentle, snowy face is a backbone of purest permafrost.

How different she is to her mother, whom we see smiling and dancing in that flickering cine-cam footage. She, too, was an actress, and is remembered by all of the interviewees in exactly the same way: as a vivacious life-and-soul type with a laugh that could set a room alight.

Diane met Michael while both were performing in the same play. Romance blossomed; marriage and children soon followed. Later, Diane took a part in a play in Montreal, and by the end of its run she was pregnant again.

That baby became Sarah, and her brothers and sisters recall how they used to joke around the dinner table that she did not look all that much like her father. There was, it transpires, a very good reason for this and – without wanting to give away what follows – the film then shifts its focus towards its maker’s biological roots.

Here is where the trouble begins. Polley uses this rather mild family secret as her springboard into a far bigger discussion about history and memory. The passing of time and the taking of sides can cause gaps to open up between these two things, until even something as seemingly reliable as film footage can obfuscate as much as it illuminates.

That’s a fascinating topic for discussion and it was discussed fascinatingly in the recent documentaries Capturing the Friedmans, Catfish and The Imposter. What sets Polley’s project apart is that so far as we ever see, history and memory fall broadly into line, and the much-vaunted ambiguity simply never turns up.

On the rare occasions her interviewees do disagree on a point, it turns out to be quibblingly minor: a brief dispute about who drove whom home from a party, for example, does not spell doom for narrative objectivity, nor does a cheap and eminently spottable final twist about the provenance of the home movie footage.

In the end, I was nagged by a question posed by Polley’s sister Joanna in the film’s opening minutes. “I guess I have this instinctive reaction: who cares about our ----ing family?” The answer, of course, is Polley herself, who smilingly tells us that a story like hers can never truly be tied down, even as she screws every last piece into place.